BORN IN THESSALONIKI IN 1961, AUGUST KIM KRUSE SEEKS HER FAMILY!
The baby in the box digs for her Greek roots
The baby in the box digs for her Greek roots
Kim Kruse hopes finding her original family will fill a void in her troubled life
A lone figure emerged from the shadows on a hot August night, glancing around nervously while carrying a box to its destination.
The figure placed the box at the edge of a street in Thessaloniki — a stone’s throw away from the gates of the Agios Stylianos orphanage in Greece’s second-biggest city — and then disappeared.
Forever.
The box contained two items. One was a piece of paper, with three brief notes written on it.
The other was a baby, 3 days old.
That’s how the story goes, anyway — the story Kim Kruse always heard from her adoptive mother.
Kim was that baby.
“I was found in a box, on the side of the road,” said Kim, a St. Cloud resident who knows she’s 54 years old only because of that note.
“My birthdate, my weight and the last name Rikaki,” she said, reciting the note’s details. “That’s what my parents were told.”
Maybe the story is true. Maybe it isn’t.
But it’s the narrative that provided the backdrop for Kim’s unsettled life, for the detachment and anger she feels, and for the quest she now has embarked upon.
Thessaloniki's port near 60 tees
Kim Kruse has the documents that chronicle her adoption from Greece, including her Greek passport, left, and her certificate of naturalization into the United States.
It’s
a story she heard over and over, a story that left her uncertain of her
roots and of her path in life — and of her biological mother, who may
have been the shadowy figure walking that Thessaloniki street in August
1961.
“How could somebody do that?” said Kim, whose dark hair and eyes are unmistakably Greek. “That’s where the anger comes from ...
“But I still wanted to find her.”
Kim’s search for her Greek roots are complicated by more than a half-century of distance from a mother she never knew, who perhaps intended for it to be that way.
It also ties Kim to an international adoption scandal that covers multiple decades and thousands of children, many of whom were literally “stolen” from Greek parents and shipped all over the world — particularly to the United States — to unsuspecting adoptive parents.
“Kim is just a small, small, small stone of sand. There is a beach covered with these sands,” said Ifigenia Kalfopoulou — herself a Greek adoptee in the 1950s and director of the Seasyp organization (www.seasyp.gr) that since 1995 has reunited “stolen” children with their biological families. “We are all over the world.”
“This is a huge story that the world knows nothing about,” said Pamela Wolf, who was adopted from Greece in 1958 and now lives near Austin, Texas. “It’s about time that somebody broke this open and let the world know how huge this is.”
Kim might be one of those “stolen” Greek babies. She isn’t sure, and she may never know.
But the baby who was left by the side of the road wants answers. And connections.
“Maybe my mom watched to see who walked over,” Kim said, envisioning that August night. “She couldn’t bear to take care of me, but maybe she put me where she put me knowing somebody would find me right away.
“That was my one consolation, that she did care.
“Otherwise, it was just, how could you put somebody in the box?”
“All over Greece, there were cases like that. It breaks my heart,” said Aspa Rigopoulou-Melcher, an Athens native and a St. Cloud State University community education professor since 2000.
Ifigenia Kalfopoulou, who was born in 1952 and very nearly was adopted by Americans, has dealt with thousands of such cases through Seasyp.
“They started the operation of stealing the babies from the poor families,” she said.
Several variations exist in this story of widespread deception and profiteering.
“There’s a lot of things that hid these children,” said Pamela Wolf, whose search for her biological family has thus far been unsuccessful. She is Seasyp’s primary operative in the United States.
“You might change the mother’s name. You might put the middle name as the first name,” Wolf said. “There were some things going on there.”
Appalling things:
• Mothers who had a child, left it at an orphanage for foster care when they traveled to find work, and returned to find their child was gone.
That was the story of Minneapolis resident Judy Gallas, who was 18 months old when she was adopted in 1958 — while her mother was away.
“She
left me at the orphanage to go to Germany to find work, with the
intention of coming back to get me and take me with her,” said Gallas,
58, whose reunion with her biological family in 2003 is one of Seasyp’s
most noteworthy success stories.
“When she came back, I had been adopted.”
• Mothers who came to an orphanage to give birth to their baby, and then were told the child had died. It hadn’t.
“My twin sister allegedly died at birth in Greece on July 20, 1965,” said Dino Tsontzos, a Tampa, Florida resident since 1987. “My sister’s body was never returned to our family for burial.
“I strongly believe that my sister never really died, but was sold or given to another unknown family or entity since that practice was common in Greece during that time.”
“A lot of these girls didn’t know to ask for a death certificate,” Wolf said. “They’d just leave crying.”
• Falsified documents that sometimes denoted a baby had been returned to its family, or had died. That baby then was re-registered at the orphanage — sometimes on the same day, under a different name.
“I am one of them,” said Kalfoupoulou, 63, who like Kim is from Thessaloniki. “I have a death certificate. I died at 5 days old. And then they changed my name.”
A lot of those kids — an estimated 8,000-10,000 — ended up in the United States, a preferred destination since American adoptive parents usually could pay more than Greek counterparts.
“This is a genocide of people. You could call this a mass exodus, perpetrated at the hands of the government,” Wolf said. “For the most part, people got away with it.”
“There is no way,” Kalfoupoulou said, “to forgive and forget.”
But there is a way to reunite.
A Greek law enacted in 1996 gave adoptees the right to go back and search for their birth parents. Before then they weren’t even allowed to look.
Kalfoupoulou started Seasyp at about the same time and has reunited 955 adoptees with their biological families in Greece.
“Almost every week, I have a reunion,” Kalfoupoulou said.
“She’s pretty much devoted her life to this work,” Gallas said.
Kim may be one of those stolen Greek children.
Maybe she really was a baby in a box.
Maybe she was both.
“Not all of us were victims of child trafficking,” she said. “Some of these (unwed) girls were literally forced to give their children up. Their fathers said, ‘You will. You’ve shamed the family.’ ”
Maybe that’s how Kim got here. That’s what she wants to find out.
“That was one of the first things Ifigenia asked me — ‘What do you want?’ ” Kim said. “I didn’t know how to answer that.
“I said other than answers, nothing.”
The answers are out there. Somewhere.
“I will find her,” Kalfoupoulou said. “I know we will find her. But this is difficult.”
“(Opal) said it would help me connect — which it did, in the personality and knowing that I am Greek,” Kim said. “You have a connection, because you finally look like somebody.
“But it also hurt, because I knew I could never find my mom.”
And visiting Agios Stylianos — the orphanage where the baby in the box was taken in 1961 — was anything but uplifting.
“They would have babies in really big cribs, eight to a crib, and they were outside,” Kim said. “If Mom and Orin hadn’t come and gotten me, what were my chances of getting out of here?
“I didn’t spend much time there. It was really hard.”
Now, fast-forward 38 years.
In April, Kim was digging through her safe deposit box when she came across her adoption papers.
For the first time in ... well, ever ... she carefully examined them.
“That’s when I first read the adoption papers from beginning to end,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t going to tell me anything.”
But reading those papers prompted an Internet search that told her a lot.
“When I Googled Agios Stylianos and I read all that,” Kim said, “that’s when I really started looking.”
She came across the Seasyp website, where the particulars of the Greek orphanage scandal unfolded.
Also
on the site was a picture of the cover of a Thessaloniki newspaper,
“Greek North,” dated Dec. 13, 1962 — three months after Kim had arrived
in Minnesota.
The cover story detailed arrests at Agios Stylianos, where authorities alleged that orphanage officials had “stolen babies.”
There were pictures of eight of those babies, all of whom were characterized in the story as being illegally adopted away to the U.S. Four of them were listed by their “inmate number,” a four-digit code assigned to them at the orphanage.
One of the babies was Inmate No. 8499.
Kim looked at the number listed in her adoption papers.
It was her.
Kim emailed Kalfopoulou through the Seasyp website. She got a quick response.
“You were among the babies that the judges were looking for (at) the time of the big trial of stolen babies (at) Agios Stylianos orphanage!” Kalfopoulou wrote. “This is why you were included in this old newspaper!
“I am a stolen baby, too, from the same orphanage, and already found my family (after) 20 years.”
Instantly, some of Kim’s perspectives about her biological mother changed.
“Some of that anger and hate that I had when I was holding Joe ... it kinda went away,” she said. “Because I thought, ‘What if?’
“What if she was told I died? Or I was taken?”
Also in Kim’s adoption papers was a reference to another set of numbers: her entry in the books of the registrar of Thessaloniki.
Vol. 24, No. 235, from 1961. It’s the registry entry of Kim’s birth.
It might include the name of her biological mother.
It might give her something she’s always wanted.
“Answers,” Kim said. “That heritage you don’t have.
“In sixth grade, we had to do our family tree. Mine was a twig in a box.”
That’s all Kim really hopes to get out of this — those answers, and a sense of closure.
To get some of those answers, a translator was needed to interpret what was written in those old Greek newspapers.
The same translator could call the registry hall in Thessaloniki. Somebody who speaks fluent Greek might be able to get some answers.
Somebody like Aspa Rigopoulou-Melcher.
“Somewhere,” Rigopoulou-Melcher said, “there must be a birth certificate for her.”
She and Kim met, for the first time, just after midnight Aug. 13.
They sat side by side at Rigopoulou-Melcher’s kitchen counter.
Aspa made the phone call.
It’s just after 8 a.m. in Thessaloniki, the second-biggest city in Greece.
A half-dozen friends and family members are hovering in the kitchen around Rigopoulou-Melcher, an Athens native, as she prepares to make what could be a pivotal phone call.
Most of those present are merely curious observers.
One of them is hoping to learn the identity of her biological mother.
“I just want some answers, and maybe give my mom some peace after all these years,” said St. Cloud resident Kim Kruse, who was left in a box near a Greek orphanage 54 years ago and has never known her biological family.
“We’ll figure it out,” said Rigopoulou-Melcher, rubbing Kim’s shoulder. “Have faith.”
All Kim knows about that past is what her adoptive parents told her — she was a baby left in a box, on the side of a street near the Agios Stylianos orphanage in Thessaloniki, in late August 1961.
Everything known about her was on an accompanying piece of paper.
“It said that name (Rikaki), and approximate weight, and birthdate (Aug. 26),” Kim said. “That’s what my parents were told. It was a little piece of paper in the box.”
In April, Kim’s search for her roots led her to website of Seasyp, a Greek organization that for the past two decades has worked to reunite “stolen” Greek babies with their biological families. An estimated 8,000-10,000 of them ended up in the United States.
Included on the website (www.seasyp.gr) is the front page of the Dec. 13, 1962, “Greek North” newspaper. It details arrests made at the orphanage, and shows pictures of eight “stolen babies.”
One of them, as confirmed by her adoption papers, is Kim.
“These lovely children come from a children’s place in Thessaloniki,” said Rigopoulou-Melcher, translating the text beneath the photos. “They were sent to families in the United States, where they are never going to find out ever that they’re Greek.
“With regular adoptions, healthy Greeks exported. Mainly in the United States. And they get lost forever from the Greek race.”
The Seasyp site also shows the June 13, 1964, cover of “Greek North,” detailing the trial of the orphanage director and eight other employees. The director was convicted of document falsification.
“Due to no prior arrest record or illegal activity, the director was given three months’ probation,” said Ifigenia Kalfopoulou, director of Seasyp and herself a Thessaloniki orphanage adoptee. “The others involved were given lesser sentences.”
Also included in Kim’s adoption papers is a reference to her registry in the Thessaloniki book of births: Vol. 24, No. 235 from 1961.
“Maybe if we find someone (at the registry hall), we can ask them what that number means,” said Rigopoulou-Melcher, a St. Cloud State University community education professor since 2000.
Normally, the registry entry would include the name of the biological mother. But Kim’s case is anything but normal.
“If there is any truth to the (story) that she was left in a box outside the orphanage, that number might not mean anything,” Rigopoulou-Melcher said. “If they wanted to be anonymous, why would they register the child in the municipality?”
That’s just one of the things everybody gathered in Rigopoulou-Melcher’s kitchen wants to find out as she calls a government office eight time zones away.
“Maybe I am one of Aristotle Onassis’ illegitimate children,” Kim said with a laugh as she pulled up a chair next to Rigopoulou-Melcher at the kitchen counter. “One can only hope.”
The phone rings, and rings, and rings.
Finally, a woman answers in her office in northern Greece.
“Ne, calimerasas (Yes, good morning to you),” Rigopoulou-Melcher says.
With that, she’s off — peppering the clerk with questions in rapid-fire Greek, which you don’t often hear in Central Minnesota.
“I won’t be learning that language any time soon,” says Kim, watching intently and listening to a stream of words she can’t understand — other than her own name and St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Rigopoulou-Melcher tells the registry clerk what she’s looking for. Kim fidgets with anticipation, and with the possibility of filling the biggest hole in a mystery that’s haunted her all her life.
“On the gate of the (Agios Stylianos) orphanage, there’s a box in front. Mothers could bring the babies and put them in there,” said Kim, who visited the facility in 1977.
“It would ring a bell inside, and if they were caught, then they’d have to come back and take care of them.”
Rigopoulou-Melcher talks with the clerk for 10 minutes, and jots down notes. The conversation winds down as Kim looks on expectantly.
“Efcharisto para poli (Thank you very much),” Rigopoulou-Melcher says.
She switches off the phone and takes a slow, deep breath.
“OK,” she says, exhaling.
“The name Rikaki was given to you because ... they said everybody needs to have a surname.
“There is a record of you — under your adopted parents’ name.”
It’s not what Kim is hoping to hear.
“She said during that time, there would be one or two kids left almost every day outside,” Rigopoulou-Melcher continues. “She used the term ‘child in the garden.’ You were left in the garden.
“It’s very difficult to find who the parents were, because it’s possible you weren’t born in Thessaloniki. It’s possible you were born in another village, or for privacy reasons there’s no record of that.
Aspa Rigopoulou and Kim Kruse joined together to find Kim's bio parents
“She’s
not going to give me any more than that,” Rigopoulou-Melcher says.
“Because she says I don’t know with whom I’m talking. She said there is
nothing else she can give me without a lawyer.”
Aspa hugs Kim. There are tears.
Kim doesn’t cry easily.
“It just made me so angry that night,” Kim said later. “That’s why I cried — when I get angry, I cry.
“The orphanage won’t say anything? As corrupt as they were? We deserve this. You’ve gotta go through the proper channels, I understand. But still ...”
It was worth a try, but this isn’t going to be easy.
“There’s a saying that when God closes one door, there’s another that opens up,” Rigopoulou-Melcher said. “There’s so many smart people here.
“We have to think about other ways we can possibly go about it.”
A dead end? Maybe not ...
She’s hopeful Kim might become the 956th. But there are obstacles.
“If she was born at home, (or) if she has been born in another area, the registration hall of Thessaloniki will not help,” said Kalfopoulou, who has made those reunions her life’s work.
“(Orphanage administrators) do not want to give you anything. They want to make it as difficult as possible on you,” said Pamela Wolf, Seasyp’s main operative in the United States and an adoptee from a Greek orphanage — the Infant Asylum of Athens — in 1958.
“My search has been 24/7, 365 days a year, calling police departments,” Wolf said. “I learned so much about what you can do, can’t do, what’s being done to obstruct you.
“It’s a fight. It is arduous work to try to find out how each person is manipulated.”
But even without orphanage cooperation or a direct paper trail, there are ways.
“There are, believe me. For every person that Ifi returns their identity, it’s justice won,” said Wolf, whose search for her own biological family is ongoing.
Sometimes, they stay that way.
Sometimes, there’s a reunion.
“I found Judy Gallas,” Kalfopoulou said. “Somebody killed her father, because her mother was very beautiful.”
Gallas, a 58-year-old Minneapolis accountant, is one of Seasyp’s most dramatic success stories.
“Ifigenia was the connection,” said Gallas, who was born Georgia Stathopoulos in a tiny Greek mountain village in the Peloponnese. “It kind of gives you shivers, the way everything fell into place.”
Gallas’ Greek father died under suspicious circumstances a month before she was born. Her mother kept her for a year, then took her to be fostered at an orphanage in Megalopoli while she traveled to Germany for work.
When she returned six months later, Georgia — renamed Judy — was gone.
“I was 18 months old,” said Gallas, who was adopted by an American couple. “When she came back, I had been adopted.”
Gallas’ biological mom kept a picture of her until her death at age 46. Ironically, that was Gallas’ exact age when she was reunited with her biological family in 2003.
“She shared that photo with my three (half) sisters,” Gallas said, “shared the story with them of this adoption that took place.
“Some of the family that was most connected to my mom kept calling me by her name. I essentially looked like her when she died.”
The most striking of those family connections were half-sisters Gallas didn’t know she had — Giota, Kety and Roula Kantopoulou.
“It was incredible to be able to meet them,” Gallas said. “I was just experiencing it on an emotional level, which was overwhelming and amazing and felt like going home.
“It gives you that heritage, that lineage. It gives you that foundation.”
That’s exactly what Kim is looking for, although after 54 years she has her doubts.
“I’m glad somebody’s positive. I’m skeptical, I guess because of all I’ve read about (Agios Stylianos),” she said.
“How can you be so positive? Where do you begin?”
“I can assure you, without a lawyer, (Kim) cannot do anything,” Kalfopoulou said. “So many are going alone to Agios Stylianos believing they will get the documents with ease.
“They cannot. (Christos) Vozikis and I together can.”
Vozikis is a Thessaloniki attorney who works closely with Ifigenia and knows the ins and outs of searching for records.
“Vozikis is very determined,” Kalfopoulou said, “and he is honest.”
“I get a POA (power of attorney) from the person interested,” Vozikis said. “Then I go to the Thessaloniki district attorney for a written permission — because all data (is) under privacy — to look in the registries of births and deaths in the archives of the city registry office.
“I am not the person who finds the parents,” he said, “but the one who approaches the documents.”
“It’s an amazing experience, but there’s somewhat of an incompletion to it. I now understand that my father died. I understand the ‘quote’ story. I understand who my relatives are in Greece.
“But I still don’t understand who my mother was,” Gallas said. “That’s the part of the whole process to me that’s lacking still.”
Kim has some of the same trepidations about her search for her own mother.
“There’s that dark side of my personality coming out,” she said. “What if she ain’t there? What if she really didn’t want me?
“I have the fear of her not accepting it, or admitting it. I don’t want to get disappointed.
“Again.”
But she wants to try.
The figure placed the box at the edge of a street in Thessaloniki — a stone’s throw away from the gates of the Agios Stylianos orphanage in Greece’s second-biggest city — and then disappeared.
Forever.
The box contained two items. One was a piece of paper, with three brief notes written on it.
The other was a baby, 3 days old.
That’s how the story goes, anyway — the story Kim Kruse always heard from her adoptive mother.
Kim was that baby.
“I was found in a box, on the side of the road,” said Kim, a St. Cloud resident who knows she’s 54 years old only because of that note.
“My birthdate, my weight and the last name Rikaki,” she said, reciting the note’s details. “That’s what my parents were told.”
Maybe the story is true. Maybe it isn’t.
But it’s the narrative that provided the backdrop for Kim’s unsettled life, for the detachment and anger she feels, and for the quest she now has embarked upon.
Kim Kruse has the documents that chronicle her adoption from Greece, including her Greek passport, left, and her certificate of naturalization into the United States.
“How could somebody do that?” said Kim, whose dark hair and eyes are unmistakably Greek. “That’s where the anger comes from ...
“But I still wanted to find her.”
Kim’s search for her Greek roots are complicated by more than a half-century of distance from a mother she never knew, who perhaps intended for it to be that way.
It also ties Kim to an international adoption scandal that covers multiple decades and thousands of children, many of whom were literally “stolen” from Greek parents and shipped all over the world — particularly to the United States — to unsuspecting adoptive parents.
“Kim is just a small, small, small stone of sand. There is a beach covered with these sands,” said Ifigenia Kalfopoulou — herself a Greek adoptee in the 1950s and director of the Seasyp organization (www.seasyp.gr) that since 1995 has reunited “stolen” children with their biological families. “We are all over the world.”
“This is a huge story that the world knows nothing about,” said Pamela Wolf, who was adopted from Greece in 1958 and now lives near Austin, Texas. “It’s about time that somebody broke this open and let the world know how huge this is.”
Kim might be one of those “stolen” Greek babies. She isn’t sure, and she may never know.
But the baby who was left by the side of the road wants answers. And connections.
“Maybe my mom watched to see who walked over,” Kim said, envisioning that August night. “She couldn’t bear to take care of me, but maybe she put me where she put me knowing somebody would find me right away.
“That was my one consolation, that she did care.
“Otherwise, it was just, how could you put somebody in the box?”
The Greek adoption scandal
A lot of unconscionable things happened in Greek orphanages and adoption cases following World War II. Fraud was rampant as countless children were placed for adoption under misleading and illegal circumstances, often for substantial sums of money.
“All over Greece, there were cases like that. It breaks my heart,” said Aspa Rigopoulou-Melcher, an Athens native and a St. Cloud State University community education professor since 2000.
Ifigenia Kalfopoulou, who was born in 1952 and very nearly was adopted by Americans, has dealt with thousands of such cases through Seasyp.
“They started the operation of stealing the babies from the poor families,” she said.
“There’s a lot of things that hid these children,” said Pamela Wolf, whose search for her biological family has thus far been unsuccessful. She is Seasyp’s primary operative in the United States.
“You might change the mother’s name. You might put the middle name as the first name,” Wolf said. “There were some things going on there.”
Appalling things:
• Mothers who had a child, left it at an orphanage for foster care when they traveled to find work, and returned to find their child was gone.
That was the story of Minneapolis resident Judy Gallas, who was 18 months old when she was adopted in 1958 — while her mother was away.
“When she came back, I had been adopted.”
• Mothers who came to an orphanage to give birth to their baby, and then were told the child had died. It hadn’t.
“My twin sister allegedly died at birth in Greece on July 20, 1965,” said Dino Tsontzos, a Tampa, Florida resident since 1987. “My sister’s body was never returned to our family for burial.
“I strongly believe that my sister never really died, but was sold or given to another unknown family or entity since that practice was common in Greece during that time.”
“A lot of these girls didn’t know to ask for a death certificate,” Wolf said. “They’d just leave crying.”
• Falsified documents that sometimes denoted a baby had been returned to its family, or had died. That baby then was re-registered at the orphanage — sometimes on the same day, under a different name.
“I am one of them,” said Kalfoupoulou, 63, who like Kim is from Thessaloniki. “I have a death certificate. I died at 5 days old. And then they changed my name.”
A lot of those kids — an estimated 8,000-10,000 — ended up in the United States, a preferred destination since American adoptive parents usually could pay more than Greek counterparts.
Pamela
Wolf, right, who lives near Austin, Texas, poses with her best friend
Robyn Dilley. Both of them were adopted by American couples from the
Infant Asylum of Athens in the 1950s. Wolf serves as the primary
U.S.-based operative for Seasyp, which works to reunite adopted Greeks
with their biological families.
“This is a genocide of people. You could call this a mass exodus, perpetrated at the hands of the government,” Wolf said. “For the most part, people got away with it.”
“There is no way,” Kalfoupoulou said, “to forgive and forget.”
But there is a way to reunite.
A Greek law enacted in 1996 gave adoptees the right to go back and search for their birth parents. Before then they weren’t even allowed to look.
Kalfoupoulou started Seasyp at about the same time and has reunited 955 adoptees with their biological families in Greece.
“Almost every week, I have a reunion,” Kalfoupoulou said.
“She’s pretty much devoted her life to this work,” Gallas said.
Kim may be one of those stolen Greek children.
Maybe she really was a baby in a box.
Maybe she was both.
“Not all of us were victims of child trafficking,” she said. “Some of these (unwed) girls were literally forced to give their children up. Their fathers said, ‘You will. You’ve shamed the family.’ ”
Maybe that’s how Kim got here. That’s what she wants to find out.
“That was one of the first things Ifigenia asked me — ‘What do you want?’ ” Kim said. “I didn’t know how to answer that.
“I said other than answers, nothing.”
The answers are out there. Somewhere.
“I will find her,” Kalfoupoulou said. “I know we will find her. But this is difficult.”
Start of the search
Kim was 15 when she and Opal visited Thessaloniki in July 1977. Instantly, she felt a bond.
“(Opal) said it would help me connect — which it did, in the personality and knowing that I am Greek,” Kim said. “You have a connection, because you finally look like somebody.
“But it also hurt, because I knew I could never find my mom.”
And visiting Agios Stylianos — the orphanage where the baby in the box was taken in 1961 — was anything but uplifting.
“They would have babies in really big cribs, eight to a crib, and they were outside,” Kim said. “If Mom and Orin hadn’t come and gotten me, what were my chances of getting out of here?
“I didn’t spend much time there. It was really hard.”
In April, Kim was digging through her safe deposit box when she came across her adoption papers.
For the first time in ... well, ever ... she carefully examined them.
“That’s when I first read the adoption papers from beginning to end,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t going to tell me anything.”
But reading those papers prompted an Internet search that told her a lot.
“When I Googled Agios Stylianos and I read all that,” Kim said, “that’s when I really started looking.”
She came across the Seasyp website, where the particulars of the Greek orphanage scandal unfolded.
The cover story detailed arrests at Agios Stylianos, where authorities alleged that orphanage officials had “stolen babies.”
There were pictures of eight of those babies, all of whom were characterized in the story as being illegally adopted away to the U.S. Four of them were listed by their “inmate number,” a four-digit code assigned to them at the orphanage.
One of the babies was Inmate No. 8499.
Kim looked at the number listed in her adoption papers.
It was her.
Kim emailed Kalfopoulou through the Seasyp website. She got a quick response.
“You were among the babies that the judges were looking for (at) the time of the big trial of stolen babies (at) Agios Stylianos orphanage!” Kalfopoulou wrote. “This is why you were included in this old newspaper!
“I am a stolen baby, too, from the same orphanage, and already found my family (after) 20 years.”
Instantly, some of Kim’s perspectives about her biological mother changed.
“Some of that anger and hate that I had when I was holding Joe ... it kinda went away,” she said. “Because I thought, ‘What if?’
“What if she was told I died? Or I was taken?”
Also in Kim’s adoption papers was a reference to another set of numbers: her entry in the books of the registrar of Thessaloniki.
Vol. 24, No. 235, from 1961. It’s the registry entry of Kim’s birth.
It might include the name of her biological mother.
It might give her something she’s always wanted.
“Answers,” Kim said. “That heritage you don’t have.
“In sixth grade, we had to do our family tree. Mine was a twig in a box.”
To get some of those answers, a translator was needed to interpret what was written in those old Greek newspapers.
The same translator could call the registry hall in Thessaloniki. Somebody who speaks fluent Greek might be able to get some answers.
Somebody like Aspa Rigopoulou-Melcher.
“Somewhere,” Rigopoulou-Melcher said, “there must be a birth certificate for her.”
She and Kim met, for the first time, just after midnight Aug. 13.
They sat side by side at Rigopoulou-Melcher’s kitchen counter.
Aspa made the phone call.
Dialing for answers
It’s just after midnight on Aug. 13 at the south St. Cloud home of Aspa Rigopoulou-Melcher and her family.
It’s just after 8 a.m. in Thessaloniki, the second-biggest city in Greece.
A half-dozen friends and family members are hovering in the kitchen around Rigopoulou-Melcher, an Athens native, as she prepares to make what could be a pivotal phone call.
Most of those present are merely curious observers.
One of them is hoping to learn the identity of her biological mother.
“I just want some answers, and maybe give my mom some peace after all these years,” said St. Cloud resident Kim Kruse, who was left in a box near a Greek orphanage 54 years ago and has never known her biological family.
“We’ll figure it out,” said Rigopoulou-Melcher, rubbing Kim’s shoulder. “Have faith.”
Kim Kruse calls a registry office in Thessaloniki, Greece with the help of Aspa Rigopolou-Melcher, a Greek native who lives in St. Cloud.
Rigopoulou-Melcher’s fluency in Greek is invaluable to Kim’s search into her mysterious past, which included a year spent in an orphanage that was at the epicenter of Greece’s decades-long adoption scandal.All Kim knows about that past is what her adoptive parents told her — she was a baby left in a box, on the side of a street near the Agios Stylianos orphanage in Thessaloniki, in late August 1961.
Everything known about her was on an accompanying piece of paper.
“It said that name (Rikaki), and approximate weight, and birthdate (Aug. 26),” Kim said. “That’s what my parents were told. It was a little piece of paper in the box.”
In April, Kim’s search for her roots led her to website of Seasyp, a Greek organization that for the past two decades has worked to reunite “stolen” Greek babies with their biological families. An estimated 8,000-10,000 of them ended up in the United States.
Included on the website (www.seasyp.gr) is the front page of the Dec. 13, 1962, “Greek North” newspaper. It details arrests made at the orphanage, and shows pictures of eight “stolen babies.”
One of them, as confirmed by her adoption papers, is Kim.
“These lovely children come from a children’s place in Thessaloniki,” said Rigopoulou-Melcher, translating the text beneath the photos. “They were sent to families in the United States, where they are never going to find out ever that they’re Greek.
“With regular adoptions, healthy Greeks exported. Mainly in the United States. And they get lost forever from the Greek race.”
The Seasyp site also shows the June 13, 1964, cover of “Greek North,” detailing the trial of the orphanage director and eight other employees. The director was convicted of document falsification.
“Due to no prior arrest record or illegal activity, the director was given three months’ probation,” said Ifigenia Kalfopoulou, director of Seasyp and herself a Thessaloniki orphanage adoptee. “The others involved were given lesser sentences.”
Also included in Kim’s adoption papers is a reference to her registry in the Thessaloniki book of births: Vol. 24, No. 235 from 1961.
“Maybe if we find someone (at the registry hall), we can ask them what that number means,” said Rigopoulou-Melcher, a St. Cloud State University community education professor since 2000.
Normally, the registry entry would include the name of the biological mother. But Kim’s case is anything but normal.
“If there is any truth to the (story) that she was left in a box outside the orphanage, that number might not mean anything,” Rigopoulou-Melcher said. “If they wanted to be anonymous, why would they register the child in the municipality?”
That’s just one of the things everybody gathered in Rigopoulou-Melcher’s kitchen wants to find out as she calls a government office eight time zones away.
“Maybe I am one of Aristotle Onassis’ illegitimate children,” Kim said with a laugh as she pulled up a chair next to Rigopoulou-Melcher at the kitchen counter. “One can only hope.”
Finally, a woman answers in her office in northern Greece.
“Ne, calimerasas (Yes, good morning to you),” Rigopoulou-Melcher says.
With that, she’s off — peppering the clerk with questions in rapid-fire Greek, which you don’t often hear in Central Minnesota.
“I won’t be learning that language any time soon,” says Kim, watching intently and listening to a stream of words she can’t understand — other than her own name and St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Rigopoulou-Melcher tells the registry clerk what she’s looking for. Kim fidgets with anticipation, and with the possibility of filling the biggest hole in a mystery that’s haunted her all her life.
“On the gate of the (Agios Stylianos) orphanage, there’s a box in front. Mothers could bring the babies and put them in there,” said Kim, who visited the facility in 1977.
“It would ring a bell inside, and if they were caught, then they’d have to come back and take care of them.”
Rigopoulou-Melcher talks with the clerk for 10 minutes, and jots down notes. The conversation winds down as Kim looks on expectantly.
“Efcharisto para poli (Thank you very much),” Rigopoulou-Melcher says.
She switches off the phone and takes a slow, deep breath.
“OK,” she says, exhaling.
“The name Rikaki was given to you because ... they said everybody needs to have a surname.
“There is a record of you — under your adopted parents’ name.”
It’s not what Kim is hoping to hear.
“She said during that time, there would be one or two kids left almost every day outside,” Rigopoulou-Melcher continues. “She used the term ‘child in the garden.’ You were left in the garden.
“It’s very difficult to find who the parents were, because it’s possible you weren’t born in Thessaloniki. It’s possible you were born in another village, or for privacy reasons there’s no record of that.
Aspa hugs Kim. There are tears.
Kim doesn’t cry easily.
“It just made me so angry that night,” Kim said later. “That’s why I cried — when I get angry, I cry.
“The orphanage won’t say anything? As corrupt as they were? We deserve this. You’ve gotta go through the proper channels, I understand. But still ...”
It was worth a try, but this isn’t going to be easy.
“There’s a saying that when God closes one door, there’s another that opens up,” Rigopoulou-Melcher said. “There’s so many smart people here.
“We have to think about other ways we can possibly go about it.”
A dead end? Maybe not ...
Seasyp success stories
Since Ifigenia Kalfopoulou founded Seasyp in 1995, the organization has reunited 955 Greek adoptees with biological parents.
She’s hopeful Kim might become the 956th. But there are obstacles.
“If she was born at home, (or) if she has been born in another area, the registration hall of Thessaloniki will not help,” said Kalfopoulou, who has made those reunions her life’s work.
“(Orphanage administrators) do not want to give you anything. They want to make it as difficult as possible on you,” said Pamela Wolf, Seasyp’s main operative in the United States and an adoptee from a Greek orphanage — the Infant Asylum of Athens — in 1958.
“My search has been 24/7, 365 days a year, calling police departments,” Wolf said. “I learned so much about what you can do, can’t do, what’s being done to obstruct you.
“It’s a fight. It is arduous work to try to find out how each person is manipulated.”
But even without orphanage cooperation or a direct paper trail, there are ways.
“There are, believe me. For every person that Ifi returns their identity, it’s justice won,” said Wolf, whose search for her own biological family is ongoing.
Sometimes, they stay that way.
“I found Judy Gallas,” Kalfopoulou said. “Somebody killed her father, because her mother was very beautiful.”
Gallas, a 58-year-old Minneapolis accountant, is one of Seasyp’s most dramatic success stories.
“Ifigenia was the connection,” said Gallas, who was born Georgia Stathopoulos in a tiny Greek mountain village in the Peloponnese. “It kind of gives you shivers, the way everything fell into place.”
Gallas’ Greek father died under suspicious circumstances a month before she was born. Her mother kept her for a year, then took her to be fostered at an orphanage in Megalopoli while she traveled to Germany for work.
When she returned six months later, Georgia — renamed Judy — was gone.
“I was 18 months old,” said Gallas, who was adopted by an American couple. “When she came back, I had been adopted.”
Gallas’ biological mom kept a picture of her until her death at age 46. Ironically, that was Gallas’ exact age when she was reunited with her biological family in 2003.
“She shared that photo with my three (half) sisters,” Gallas said, “shared the story with them of this adoption that took place.
“Some of the family that was most connected to my mom kept calling me by her name. I essentially looked like her when she died.”
“It was incredible to be able to meet them,” Gallas said. “I was just experiencing it on an emotional level, which was overwhelming and amazing and felt like going home.
“It gives you that heritage, that lineage. It gives you that foundation.”
That’s exactly what Kim is looking for, although after 54 years she has her doubts.
“I’m glad somebody’s positive. I’m skeptical, I guess because of all I’ve read about (Agios Stylianos),” she said.
“How can you be so positive? Where do you begin?”
'They are trying to hide the truth'
You begin with a good lawyer — and with a good cop and a bad cop.
“I can assure you, without a lawyer, (Kim) cannot do anything,” Kalfopoulou said. “So many are going alone to Agios Stylianos believing they will get the documents with ease.
“They cannot. (Christos) Vozikis and I together can.”
Vozikis is a Thessaloniki attorney who works closely with Ifigenia and knows the ins and outs of searching for records.
“Vozikis is very determined,” Kalfopoulou said, “and he is honest.”
“I get a POA (power of attorney) from the person interested,” Vozikis said. “Then I go to the Thessaloniki district attorney for a written permission — because all data (is) under privacy — to look in the registries of births and deaths in the archives of the city registry office.
“I am not the person who finds the parents,” he said, “but the one who approaches the documents.”
Keeping the faith
Her 2003 reunion with her biological Greek family was tremendously important to Judy Gallas. Still, it left a bit of a void.
“On one level, it was wonderful and a blessing,” she said. “On another level, it created a lot of internal turmoil for me.“It’s an amazing experience, but there’s somewhat of an incompletion to it. I now understand that my father died. I understand the ‘quote’ story. I understand who my relatives are in Greece.
“But I still don’t understand who my mother was,” Gallas said. “That’s the part of the whole process to me that’s lacking still.”
Kim has some of the same trepidations about her search for her own mother.
“There’s that dark side of my personality coming out,” she said. “What if she ain’t there? What if she really didn’t want me?
“I have the fear of her not accepting it, or admitting it. I don’t want to get disappointed.
“Again.”
But she wants to try.
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